Link Love (2013-11-19)

Thought-provoking

“In the end, sex is like… it’s not really like anything. Freed from analogies and paradigms and fixed linear progression, sex can get amorphous. There’s no order to do things in, no right or wrong (consensual) things to do, no guarantee of how it will or won’t change you, no idea how it does or doesn’t correlate with romantic attachment, no guide to what will come next. It’s not even entirely clear what sex is. Sex could be freakin’ anything if the people doing it want it to be.” The Sexcalator – The Pervocracy

“When at age 33 I quit corporate law to become a writer, most people I knew, including my very own self, thought I was nuts. I’d dreamed of being a writer since I was four, but when I graduated college decided I should be practical, applied to law school, and for the next decade forgot all about writing. I had never published a word in my life.” How I Quit My Job & Became a Writer – Susain Cain

“Selfishness is not (necessarily) a bad thing.
In its most basic sense, selfishness is a necessary part of any healthy relationship, or for that matter, any healthy life. We cannot set personal boundaries if we do not have a sense of motivated self-interest. We cannot care for others if we do not take care of ourselves.” On Selfishness – More Than Two

Religion

“If you maintain that the Bible is infallible then you have to accept that the Hebrews were commanded by God to kill every man, woman, and child who stood in the way of them getting the land occupied by the Canaanites because that’s what it says. Presumably those attacked were to be given the option of fleeing for their lives, but that’s little consolation since in either case the Hebrews were told to take their “promised land” by violent force. No one was to be left alive including women, children, babies and even the livestock. For many Christians (well, non-Calvinists anyway) this is just too much. If you maintain that Jesus was the real-world expression of the nature and character of God, and if you maintain that Jesus taught love for all people, not merely those like us, and that you should turn the other cheek, then this story (among many others) presents a major problem. Here you have Yahweh personally demanding the killing of presumably thousands of not only adults but also infants and children who could not possibly be held responsible for whatever their parents did to deserve genocide. This essentially makes Yahweh a war criminal. And no, it doesn’t make the situation any better if in some cases only some but not all of the women and children were killed, contrary to the language of the text cited above. I can almost hear someone objecting, “When he said to ‘kill everything‘ he didn’t really mean it like that.” Maybe go back and read it again.” I Draw the Line at Canaan – godless in dixie

“While dismissing “worldly” standards of beauty, Christian culture actually holds women up to an even higher standard of appearance: your physical beauty is both entirely dependent on who you are as a person and how you conform to feminine standards of behavior and you should meet Christian standards of beauty appearance while pretending that you’re not focusing at all on your beauty.” The impossible standards of Christian beauty expectations – Speaking when the world sleeps

Equality

“Privilege is not something you can necessarily control (except in the case of religious privilege in the United States). And I want to make this absolutely clear, because it is important for the subsequent discussion: Having privilege does not make you a bad person.
Saying that you have privilege is merely a statement of fact, not a value judgment.” Privilege: Invisible Advantages – Dianna E. Anderson

“Your son is coming of age in that culture with those messages swirling around him. You might have raised him in a home that perpetuated that culture without ever intending to or perhaps you raised him in a home that taught values in complete contrast to that culture. The more important question is: did you ever directly tell him to never buy into that culture? Did you ever tell him that culture is unacceptable and WRONG? Did you ever have any of the aforementioned conversations?
When you have the “avoid getting raped” conversation with your daughter, it is difficult, as you don’t want to imagine her as a victim. The idea of having the “don’t rape” conversation with your son is more difficult as you don’t ever want to imagine him as a perpetrator.
Do it anyway.” The Conversation You Must Have With Your Sons – Huffington Post

“The brittle fragility of manhood means that men must always be on their guard against moments when their masculinity might be destroyed. A moment of weakness means that it can all come crashing down around your ears – handing in your man card and accepting your position as “bitch”. As a result, any vulnerability must be defended against because weakness means that somebody else will take your power – your manhood – away. A sleight against your power or status must always be answered or else you will be tacitly acknowledging that you are that person’s bitch. You have to establish your alpha dominance in the group by taking away other people’s power, or else they are in a position to take yours. There is no in between when it comes to manhood – you’re either a man or you’re a pussy, no in-between.
And the most common way of establishing this power? Violence and the threat of violence.” When Masculinity Fails Men – Paging Dr. NerdLove

“As bad as Men’s Rights Activists are for women (and, really, for our collective humanity), they’re also doing harm to the causes they claim to care about. When an AVFM contributor in Australia called a hotline posing as a man being beaten by his wife and needing a shelter for himself and his son, he claims he was denied help. But if you listen to the recording (or read the transcript), you can clearly hear the counselor on the other line offer multiple forms of assistance, including a free hotel for himself and his son, a direct connection to a police officer specializing in domestic violence, and more. Far from their tagline “compassion for men and boys,” this incident reveals that MRAs are happy to abandon men and boys to real danger when it suits their hate campaign against women.” A Good Men’s Rights Movement Is Hard to Find – The Prospect

“Cathy was walking to the bus after work, deep in thought. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw a man trying to get her attention.
Putting on her best Polite, Accommodating Voice she inquired:
“I’m sorry. What did you say?”
The man stammered/blushed/mumbled/stumbled away and that’s when Cathy realized he’d actually been catcalling her and she’d inadvertently politely confronted him. And when she actually responded to him, he nearly turned inside out with shame and cowardice. ” What to Do When Someone Says Something Offensive – yes and yes

Beauty & Body Image

“I had also assumed that discomfort was my fate so long as I had these stupid lumps of fat hanging off of me, and to some degree that isn’t wrong–even perfectly fitted bras can annoy me after awhile, because by necessity they are tight-fitting and often stiff garments and that’s still somewhat of a challenge for me to ignore at times. But I now own bras with UNDERWIRE that don’t make me so grouchy I want to strangle someone after wearing one for two hours. A few of them I even kind of enjoy. And the comfy wire-free bras I always preferred are vastly more comfortable and more supportive when I buy the proper size.” sensitive – a little dose of keelium

“Yes, I thought as I wandered off, I have finally found the answer to my harem enigma. Unlike the Muslim man, who uses space to establish male domination by excluding women from the public arena, the Western man manipulates time and light. He declares that in order to be beautiful, a woman must look 14 years old. If she dares to look 50 or, worse, 60, she is beyond the pale. By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility. In fact, the modern Western man enforces one of Immanuel Kant’s 19th-century theories: To be beautiful, women have to appear childish and brainless. When a women looks mature and self-assertive, or allows her hips to expand, she is condemned as ugly. Thus, the walls of the European harem separate youthful beauty from ugly maturity.” Size six: The Western women’s harem – OdeWire

Inspirational

“The too small shoes that I have worn throughout my life have said this: You can’t handle this. You’re not capable. You’re too sensitive. You’re too fragile. You’re a flawed mess. You’re too much. (Just who do you think you are?) You’re not enough. And worse: you’re unworthy.
The too small shoes are the shoes of my young, young self. And when I’m wearing those shoes – when I’m believing that I’m too sensitive and too much – I react as a young, young being. I feed: I eat. I soothe with food. I overconsume. I freeze: I collapse. I fight: I attack myself or I attack others with blame, criticism and judgment.” Changing habits with kindness, not control: my experience – First Ourselves

“The thing is?
You don’t have time for the Maybe People.
You’re a People Pleaser, I get it. You want everyone to like you, everyone to feel cared for, and ohmygod you HATE ruffling feathers. You like to Make Nice. Always.
But you only have so much time and energy. How are you going to spend it?
I don’t believe you want to spend it waiting around for the wafflers and ho-hum crowd while they agonize over whether they’re missing out on something better.
Because you’re the best.
You want the YES people.” You don’t have time for “maybe” – Heather Day

Health

“Although one should never feel the need to perform pain for a doctor, performing a lack of pain has consequences as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly, performing health looks a lot like performing female gender. Since I am mostly homebound and comfort is key, I don’t usually spend a lot of time on my appearance, but when I do go out, I feel compelled to pluck my eyebrows and make sure every stray hair on my head is secured. I make a conscious effort to smile and laugh enthusiastically, despite my pain. I ask many questions and show unending interest in friends’ lives, attempting to downplay my own struggles and avoid complaint. The desire to protect others (and my own ego) prompts me to make myself and my pain less threatening—that is, more female.” The Picture of Health: Gender Bias in Pain – Adios Barbie

“That’s because the stress response is a preparedness tool, sometimes hastily thrown together by the body and wrongly interpreted by our brains, but it’s not the enemy. It’s there to make us work better under duress. It heightens our senses and steels our nerves and increases our attention to detail. We need it. And if we learn to reinterpret the stress response, the actual physiological changes that occur when you encounter a stressor, you may be able to reduce, sidestep, or repurpose the negative effects of stress on health. One recent study suggests this, finding that although high amounts of stress increase the risk of dying, it does so only in individuals who perceive stress to be harmful. In people who don’t see stress as a health threat, stress does not appear to increase mortality.” Rethinking Stress: It Could Save Your Life – Mark’s Daily Apple